Elopocalypse, Day Six: The Nokia-Microsoft deal has by now been thoroughly flogged to death analysed from every quarter, with much of the emphasis on the risks and the negatives. Yet there are some positives. Here is a selection, ranging from the flippant to the frivolous.
5. Dave Stewart Will No Longer Be An Agent of Change …

Sigh.

talk.maemo is filled with people saying goodbye to nokia and hatred, amid a band of fanbois that want to buy all the now second hand N900's because they presumably sleep with them.

What it isn't is a smooth and well run bunch of app makers that release them perfect and fit for market in a timely manner. Just look at at the number of 'apps' (very loose term) available if you turn OFF 'Maemo testing' and 'Maemo development.' repositories

I know, I frequent it.

To the article,

I recently ran the Steam hardware survey on my windows 7 machine and it came back reporting as Vista. Ran it a few times and it still reports itself to a detection utility as Vista.

Don't hold out much hope for M$ if they want to make themselves look serious competition when they can't update their coding to at least change a name in a text file.

Sigh again

Why is it Microsoft's fault if Steam can't be bothered to update their utility to recognise that 7 is not Vista? Your Windows install will be reporting itself to the utility as v6.1, the Steam utility needs to recognise that 6.1 is not 6.0. A rudimentary bit of programming that takes less than 5 minutes.

Furthermore ...

"There is almost no interest in developing for Nokia's current platforms or tools. It has failed. It is time to bury it."

Or perhaps it shows that developing on that platform is a damn site easier. Who knows.

You can't just look at some numbers or a graph and pluck truths from it. Even if those numbers accurately show something, we don't know what that something is. You need some methodology in science. How many times do you have to be told this?

Not easier.

"Or perhaps it shows that developing on that platform is a damn site easier. Who knows."

Everyone I know who has developed for Symbian says it stinks. They compare it to programming Windows 3.x, only worse... Making 3.party developers' life easier is about the only part of Nokia Windows strategy that makes sense.

Stop blaiming everything on Karen

She is simply rehashing the idiocy propagated by management consultancy that the best company is the company where everyone is customer _CONNECTED_.

That idiocy has been inoculated into nearly every big European company by the big-4. If you work for a listed company in Western Europe you have that as a sacred value on which every person working for the company has to report on a nearly daily basis.

There is _NO_ bigger management idiocy than that.

If 20 people are working on something every single one of them will go and annoy the customer with their questions and tales of their progress. Every one of them will waste 20%+ of his time on this. The customer will hear 20 slightly different stories and will be initially confused, later annoyed and after a short period utterly bored and no-longer engaged with the project.

As a result every product will take an age to deliver, look like designed by a committee and has no chance whatsoever to compete on the market because it will not be something the customer wants.

Further to this, all products are guaranteed to be non-innovative. An innovative product is guaranteed to be disliked by at least someone. If you go and ask the user multiple times on every step you will only deliver "more of the same". As a result your company stops to innovate and the big 4 who surprise surprise advised you on this management idiocy in the first place can camp around your HQ waiting for innovation to be outsourced.

So stop blaming Karen. She is just the messenger. It is Accenture, IBM and their like who have drafted the message in the first place.

??? Damn has to have letters

The guys tone would be perfect sarcasm but based on number of downvotes I am assuming its some M$ shill assclown after all. Too lazy to click links but would be amusing if they were all talking about what a steaming pile of crap wp7 is and how it DOA even with Nokia (over a year to deliver first product, cue funeral music).

Re: Windows Phone Lives!

Is Google making money from Android or not?

Your criticism of Android seems a bit contradictory. Is Android a money losing prospect that could be dropped by Google at any moment, or is it funnelling all the proceeds of the exploding smartphone/mobile web market segment to Google at the expense of their hardware partners? Cos it can't really be both.

credit overdrawn ....

>And give the Beast some credit: Windows 7 is Vista without the most annoying bits.

having been totally frustrated trying to manage a win7 install, one thankfully missing my esteemed corpse's i/t spyware, i'd be really curious to know which annoying bits fester's thugs left out. seems to be a plethora of really annoying bits not to mention all the missing features that once made winxp almost manageable ....

Also

Wasp T-12

I'm reliably informed that the Wasp T-12 was completely useless in central London, particularly The City. What happened was interference London Aquarium caused havoc with the Anti-Shark action and rendered the phone inoperable. By the time they got round to releasing a firmware update it was too late, the damage was done.

It's a shame, because it had some particularly advanced features at the time - my favorite was the keypad featuring all known integers - revolutionary!

Actually

Documentation and Microsoft

Microsoft had traditionally very good documentation. No need to search the internet, if the context help of the IDE works well. It's a different philosophy. I almost never had to search the internet for windows phone hints, except at the beginning (tutorials Microsoft websites were enough)

Qt is older than WP7

Software

I think Android is the only device people buy because of the software, iPhones people buy because of the Apple tag, then they go down the HTC or Samsung route but it really is a name first, software second type of segment.

Nokia is strong, practically everyone will identify a Nokia just from the ringtone, put a blind person in a room with an iPhone and a Nokia, make them ring and 100% of the time the guy will pick the Nokia correctly.

So is it really a loss to Nokia to switch to WM7? Will the common person care (or even know) that their mobile is running Windows Mobile 7? Do they know (or care) that their iPhone is running OSwhatever (No, CISCO is IOS not Apple!)?

Hopefully it's only a short term partnership, if Nokia can focus on just making the hardware and leaving the software/ui/platform to MS and bring out a compelling mobile with fantastic hardware that blows the opposition away, they could be on to a winner, if however Nokia continue down the route of underpowered hardware with a fantastic camera lens then they will drop down and down and down and maybe down some more.

At the moment though, they just need to protect the Nokia branding, sod what OS is running on their phone, they have to bring out devices which make people think "wow!", or maybe Intel will get in on the market and release a Meego mobile which gains cult status and in 2 years time Intel becomes the leading supplier of mobiles in the world.

Okay, which is it?

@ David Webb

"(I)f Nokia can focus on just making the hardware and leaving the software/ui/platform to MS and bring out a compelling mobile with fantastic hardware that blows the opposition away, they could be on to a winner,"

I suspect that Nokia's best plan is to create TWO versions of every phone -- one with crap specs and an identical-looking one with great specs.

If they give the high-end one to MS to develop for, the MS engineers will do their usual job -- bloat-up the system so that it takes every cycle and every MB for itself and makes everything else run like a spavined dog.

OTOH, if they send the low-end phone to develop on, the MS engineers will do exactly the same thing -- but when Nokia then bins the low-end jobbie and releases the high-spec phone with the (comparatively) stripped down system installed everything will have room to breathe and will go like gangbusters!

"iPhones people buy because of the Apple tag..."

Bollocks. Brand loyalty is a major factor in purchases. You sound like and individual that is a brand fan of Nokia. You'll rationalise this with comments like "iPhones people buy because of the Apple tag..." You say this because simply because can't accept that iPhone and iOS is an excellent and extremely well supported mobile platform and they chanllenge the brand value that you share with Nokia and as a result you childishly 'hate' Apple because of their 'fans' or because of some other half-baked ideology. Give it up! Every single non-geek I know that has an Android handset got it because it was free with a cheap contract. The non-geeks I know with iPhones got them because they perform the functions that they want it to. Nokia and Microsoft have an uphill struggle to stop the rot.

"...put a blind person in a room with an iPhone and a Nokia, make them ring and 100% of the time the guy will pick the Nokia correctly." Meaningless! It merely means that Nokia have successfully created one of the world's most irritating ringtones!

"Will the common person care (or even know) that their mobile is running Windows Mobile 7? Do they know (or care) that their iPhone is running OSwhatever (No, CISCO is IOS not Apple!)" They know it says "Windows". That may help, but then Microsoft name in the general public is still linked with the Vista farce, so it could be a hinderance. We'll see. BTW, Apple licensed (i.e. payed) the iOS name from Cisco.

The damage has been done to the Nokia brand; decent enough cheap feature phones, unreliable for anything more.

They can do it, no problem!

So what would you do after burning your bridges?

I'd say there's basically no technical reason to go with WP7, apart from the one thing that redmond does time and again and oh so well: Reinventing the wheel, badly. That gives point to what we've already established: It's entirely political. You could call it "strategic" but I won't. "Political" will have to do.

Even trying to argue symbian isn't dead yet, well, as a foundation for mindshare, excuse me, "an ecosystem", it is now that _someone_ dumped it closed after open-sourcing it was done so well, fizzle on a butterstick, it's a poster child of how not to open-source anything, ever. Fizzle, did I say fizzle? Finding out that the source was a lie disappointed me so much it made me really angry. "Ecosystem condestruction", add trademark and copyright signs to taste. But it was pretty clear it wasn't going to live in that state, so it got dumped.

That someone, of course, was Elop, and we could and should have read that as a more than likely sidelining of meego already, simply because he clearly was not interested in open source anything. I mean, after doing something like that you can't turn around and say "but we believe in open source, cross our hearts honest!" Nobody'll believe you. So at least he didn't compound the lie that was open source symbian further. But it did mean he pretty much burned his bridges there already.

So he's playing a hand of weakness. Unless his "ecosystem" noises mean something else than you or I think they mean. He clearly thinks the more important of his customer base are operators, and there you don't really care about lots of silly apps in an app store. What he's then probably after is "value added" stuff like branding, or perhaps large corporate custom stuff. Who knows. But I don't expect to see an app store soon, or at most a half-hearted one. Like ovi, only this time much more enterprise-y. This "ecosystem" will more or less entirely consist of programmers on the nokia payroll, or perhaps someone else's payroll, like some operator's, but if I were an operator I'd be happy to pay a consulting fee instead. Sort-of like symbian, only now nokia no longer owns the foundations it's building on. I can see that growing into a roaring success, indeed I can.

I got my Dave Stewarts mixed up for a second there

...you are missing the point...

Windows Mobile 5/6.xx was a very good very powerful operating system for smartphones - it was developed, it was stable, and it was well liked, despite what the iFanbois say. You only have to look at xda-developers and people still developing new ROMs for phones that are 6 years old...

WinMo 7 is powerful, yes - but they tried to follow the iPhone route, and in the process alienated the very core of people who were very happy with their WinMo 6/6.1/6.5 phones - who could overclock them to their hearts content (HTC Startrek - 200mhz stock, to 263mhz clocked for example- a 32% increase) and mix and match different elements of different suppliers to their hearts content...

Then you have Symbian - a UI designed around a power sipping OS core - that could give a 200mhz phone a standby time of days, when the same phone running win mobile would maybe make a day if you were nice to it. It would have flown on something like the 1Ghz Snapdragon... and to be fair, all this twaddle about 'usability'... if you cant use a new phone os adequately within 2 weeks you have no right to own a smartphone...

I think this might actually be the nail in the coffin for iOS - because I suspect that engineers are going to ripping the symbian OS to pieces and looking very carefully at how the EPOC IP and core modules etc can be shoehorned or modified/ported to work with WinMo 7 - and if that can be done.... a smartphone that can last 6 days reasonable usage on a single charge...? We'll be back to the halcyon days of the E75 and the 9300i - phones that could do practically anything you asked of them, but didnt need their own personal private powerstation with which to do it..

On that alone iPhone will be dead in the water - since it has no real differentiations between it and any of the other options... even the chinese KIRF phone manufacturers have just written a UI overlay over MTK so theirs looks like the iPhone OS...

If Microsoft & Nokia play their cards right I suspect the following will happen..,

1. Symbian and the EPOC core will be ripped apart and examined minutely

2. The results of this examination will be ported to WinMo7 with an intent to increasing battery life, possibly to the extent of multiple days with normal use..

3. WinMo 7 will be the flagship line for smartphones

4. The EPOC/Symbian system will be updated - possibly using something like HTCs sense as a new IU overlay - after all the ability of the OS core was never an issue, it was the symbian UI that was hopelessly fragmented.

5. Renamed and refitted Symbian as was will be what powers intermediate/low level touchscreen and QWERTY/keypad smartphones

6. WinMo 6.5 updated and refreshed for the market that is now referred to as 'dumbphones'

EPOC phones with as good/better battery life - decent processors - up to date UI (sense or a version of the 'tiles' system on WinMo7).

WinMo 6 phones (under a different name)- probably non touchscreen - or QWERTY phones - with a slimmed down Sense or Tiles or other new UI - cheap processors, fair media ability - for the people who want a more simple phone that can occasionally do 'the smartphone'. Its entirely possible to run windows 6.5 + Sense UI + email & media on a 300-350mhz processor.

... its even entirely possible even now to sync your WinMo handset with your Google mail/calendar/contacts... Google havent been advertising that now have they...

Given attractive and innovative handset designs (updated Nokia E75 anyone?) and proper software testing - this Microkia ecosystem could give both iOS (top end) and Android (medium to low end) a good run for their money...

Just too funny

a) WinMo 6/6.1/6.5 were liked so much that when given a choice people went for Apple, Google or Rim instead of the piece of Microsoft crap. Even Microsoft realised how crap Windows Mobile was and dumped it.

b) Whats to stop Apple, Google or anyone else from hiring all those soon to be ex Norkia engineers and getting them to work on improving OS performance, the answer is nothing.

c) "twaddle about 'usability' ", why again is Nokia dumping Symbian?

d) The fact that you suspect that Microsoft would use any part of Symbian, an open source operating system shows that you shouldn't be allowed to comment without parental supervision.

e) A UI overlay is just that and nothing more, if the Iphone has "no real differentiations between it and any of the other options" other than a UI overlay why didn't Microsoft, Nokia and Palm just do that. Afterall the chinese are doing that

f) Points 1,2 & 4 won't happen meaning neither will points 2 & 6, as for point 5 well thats just a continuation of what Nokia is doing now.

praying eh?

That those shares M$ gave you will vest and be worth something some day eh there shill? Mark my words as long as Ballmer is running the show at M$ WinMo 7 will never be anything but a bit player me too affair ala the Zune.

...see, it can do tricks...

My favourite phones of all I have owned - a HTC 8500 running 6.1 and a E75 running Symbian - both over 6 years old.

No others have really come close, even with all the bells and whistles.

EPOC/Symbian is still a viable smartphone OS as has been proved by the N8-00 which, surprise surprise, is running Symbian. Microsoft are well known for nicking other peoples software (its how they started if we are brutally honest) and personally I think they would be stupid not to leverage the EPOC IP - even if its only to look at why symbian phones tend to have such better battery life and run so much better on less meaty hardware...

I suppose you havent bothered to go look at all the different pieces of software you can use to skin, modify, adjust and update both WinMo and Symbian... no I thought not, muppetboi

For example - Rinku Iconbar & PointUI on both touch and non touch screen winmo devices - skins the WinMo experience. Smarttoolkit, gives you a windows 9x/XP style customisable start bar to the point you dont even have to leave the home screen to get most tasks done - and ooh look, they're free.. or you could go to xda-developers, find your handset, run hardspl (equiv of rooting in 'droid) and put a whole new rom on it... in less than 3 hours start to finish.

If I want to - using Smarttoolkit - I can even reboot my 8500 phone, from the homescreen, in the grand total of 5 keypresses. Takes me less than 2 seconds.

There are/were numerous people skinning symbian - not to mention various freeware, or cheap apps to provide functionality improvements - most of which cover the bitching and whining about how symbian is out of date and so on ad nauseous (which is what people like you make me feel when I have to explain things for the 15th time).

You just have to take maybe a sunday having a look on the net and finding the SW that works for you with whatever device you have and you are away.

In fact - I have spent about 4 hours today getting my 2006 HTC 8500 back up and working - and have found some new apps that even I didn't know about for it... pretty much any phone will work for you if you take the time to learn it, and then take the time to go find things that deal with the problems you just cant live with - you can be guaranteed someone else will have had the same issue. And guess what, they're mostly free.

Symbians biggest problem wasn't so much its UI or its abilities (it can still do things even now that WinPrat 7 cant manage) - it was the fact that at every turn it was lambasted by reviewers because they didn't have the time or the inclination to do their jobs and learn how to use the symbian OS/UI (or spent most of the time playing with WinMo/Android/idiotOS eyecandy and didnt have the time, or were distracted by the shiny pretty colours)...

I'm beginning to think that like there is a driving test to see if you can get a BMW M5 round a bend without tree-hugging - there should be a test for people so they show a certain level of aptitude before being allowed behind the wheel of a smartphone, and you, sadly, seem to be the epitome of the 'sorry sir, I regret to inform you that you have failed' fraternity.

The next 12 months

The next 12 months are going to extremely difficult for Nokia.

It is highly unlikely that they will be able to release a WP7 phone during that period so what happens to their business in the meantime? Developers will be jumping from the Symbian ship enmasse, likewise for Meego.

Where are these devs going to go? Straight to retooling for WP7? With no guarantee that it will be a success? Or will they just up stumps altogether and move over to Android or iOS?

In the meantime, phone salesmen in the high street will be turning buyers away from Nokia.

"oh, didn't you hear? Symbian is dead mate, you don't want to go there. Check out this shiny Android phone over here instead!"

This article does a good job of outlining the difficulties facing Nokia in the time leading up to the release of their WP7 phones (If you can get past the "haha's" peppered through it)

This is grand for almost all

First, it killed WinMo deader than Canasta. Having now betrayed every single player in Mobile tech, including Nokia they have no entry into mobile. If they can't get into the market they can't dirupt and dominate it, which means the following step, halting progress, is out of the question too. Obviously we all benefit from that.

Second, it puts Nokia's market share "in play". Android and iOs will continue their gains because they cannot now have a credible offering until Microsoft launches a future version of their desktop OS that runs well on a phone. ETA on that is: never. Young upstarts in China and India are even now spinning up factories for downmarket phones and tablets, bringing real tech to this vast pool of humanity much sooner than I had thought likely, even if it's years slower than I would have liked. It gives the slimmest of openings for Meego and WebOS if they move fast and true.

Third, like almost every company its size, Nokia's. Stock is tied up with slow-moving institutional investors. It provides one of those rare opportunities to get in and eat their lunch, instead of the other way around.

Finally, with the demise of Microsoft's mobile efforts comes something some of us have been waiting for for a generation: The opportunity to be free of their control and. Obstruction of progress for good and ever. Google doesn't tell people what to not invent. They don't throw their partners under the bus. They don't engineer their platforms to work poorly for their app. Competitors. Their apps are freestanding, but work well with each other and others. They don't use proprietary secret data formats to lock in customers. Google trusts us to keep choosing them every day based on quallity. Google trusts in themselves that they can deliver the quality every year so they don't need lock in.

Required title now inserted.

Windows dominated the desktop because MS 'forced' the hardware makers to bundle it with the PC. MS has missed the boat on the new wave of computing (smartphones, tablets) and is now desperate to find someone, anyone, where they can stick their OS in a bid to remain relevant. They're being squeezed by small-form-factor hardware outside the office, and by cloud-computing inside the office, leaving them without a market. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Bill was canny enough to get out at the top.

The day when MS releases Office to run on Android/whatever is drawing closer... and Linus will have won.

The graph of interest...

The validity of that graph is a joke.

To my knowledge android far outperforms iOS in the new releases, and is going to pass iOS in apps sometime in the future. But on that graph its 40% behind in interest. If the graph would reflect the probability of app releases then android should have the biggest bar. By a great margin. But it doesnt.

This graph more likely reflects the aptitude of guys, and gals, of turning up apps. iOS and android have such a tall bars as they have the least experienced eq amateurs having a go with the platform, and never turning out a app. QT and meego have lover numbers as they have other forums, and more experience in programming, being from the linux background.

This is like comparing formula 1 to microcart forums. Even if microcart forums have more articles it doesnt mean that there are more professional drivers there.

"App Genome projects Android Market will have more apps than Apple by mid-2012, no word on parity in quality"

Also I was surpirced when I found out that Google and Nokia are running neck to neck in appshop revenue. For 2 years. And when you take into account that there are more andoid apps than symbian apps, the symbian app developers are getting a lot more money per app than android developers.